Imperial Octavo – Book Paper Sizes

209.55 × 292.1mm | 8.3 × 11.5in

The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms is commonly used by libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books, ranging from folio (the largest), to quarto (smaller) and octavo (still smaller). Historically, these terms referred to the format of the book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto (from Latin quartō, ablative form of quartus, fourth) historically was a book printed on a sheet of paper folded twice to produce four leaves (or eight pages), each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions.

As printing and paper technology developed, it became possible to produce and to print on much larger sheets or rolls of paper and it may not be apparent (or even possible to determine) from examination of a modern book how the paper was folded to produce them. For example, a modern novel may consist of gatherings of sixteen leaves, but may actually have been printed with sixty-four pages on each side of a very large sheet of paper. Similarly, the actual printing format cannot be determined for books that are perfect bound, where every leaf in the book is completely cut out (i.e., not conjugate to another leaf as in gatherings) and is glued into the spine. Modern books are commonly called folio, quarto and octavo based simply on their size rather than the format in which they were actually produced, if that can even be determined. Scholarly bibliographers may describe such books based on the number of leaves in each gathering (eight leaves per gathering forming an octavo), even where the actual number of pages printed on the original sheet is unknown or may reject the use of these terms for modern books entirely.

Today, octavo and quarto are the most common book sizes, but many books are produced in larger and smaller sizes as well. Other terms for book size have developed, an elephant folio being up to 23 inches tall, an atlas folio 25 inches, and a double elephant folio 50 inches tall.

During the hand press period, full sheets of paper were manufactured in a great variety of sizes which were given a number of names, such as pot, demy, foolscap, crown, etc. These were not standardized and the actual sizes varied depending on the country of manufacture and date.

The size and proportions of a book will thus depend on the size of the original sheet of paper used in producing the book.

For example, if a sheet 19 inches (480 mm) by 25 inches (640 mm) is used to print a quarto, the resulting book will be approximately 12 1⁄2 inches (320 mm) tall and 9 1⁄2 inches (240 mm) wide, before trimming. Because the size of paper used has differed over the years and localities, the sizes of books of the same format will also differ. A typical octavo printed in Italy or France in the 16th century thus is roughly the size of a modern mass market paperback book, but an English 18th-century octavo is noticeably larger, more like a modern trade paperback or hardcover novel.

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